The faction issued a statement in English and Arabic, broadcasting on its website saying it damaged four-wheel-drive vehicle belonging of U.S. intelligence in Baghdad, without specifying the location.

The group stressed that the competent group who planted the explosive device on one of the main roads in Baghdad targeted a convoy of the occupation forces and confirmed in a statement the killing of a U.S. soldier and injured others destroying Chevrolet style vehicle.

Look, it is this simple - the Intelligence was not just sexed-up, it was concocted - further, the legal advice was not just sexed-up, it was also concocted - so, "the supreme international war crime" (according to the Geneva Conventions) of waging aggressive war on a sovereign state, was indeed committed by Blair, Goldsmith, Straw, Hoon, Falconer, Morgan and others.

A suicide bomber killed 12 people in an Iraqi mosque on Friday while thousands of followers of anti-American Shi'ite cleric Moqtada al-Sadr demonstrated in Baghdad after parliament passed a pact allowing U.S. troops to remain through 2011.

Some 9,000 people protested in Baghdad's Shi'ite slum of Sadr City after Friday prayers, burning a U.S. flag and holding banners reading "No, no to the agreement." About 2,500 people held a similar rally in the southern city of Basra.

Iraq's most influential Shiite cleric has "concerns" about the U.S.-Iraqi security pact, but will leave voters to decide its fate in a referendum to be held by July 30, an official at the cleric's office said Saturday.

Al Qaeda's second-in-command said in an Internet video the U.S. financial crisis was caused by Washington's military campaigns in Iraq and Afghanistan and taxpayers were paying the price.

Al-Sadr called on his supports on Friday to "put up black flags, organize mourning ceremonies across the country and hold peaceful demonstrations."

The movement pledged to "keep up its rejection of this humiliating accord and resist through all means," Aws al-Khafaji, a close aide to the cleric was quoted by AFP as saying at a press conference.

It is critical for anyone who is really after knowing the truth to consider two of the most significant events involving Americans since the year 2000. (1)The war on terrorism and (2) the attack on Iraq. How did we come to be involved with these events and also how did we go about assessing blame and identifying the culprits? Looking carefully and dispelling the hype pushed on us by an untrustworthy media would expose significant facts.

Officials in Washington said the administration has withheld the official English translation of the agreement in an effort to suppress a public dispute with the Iraqis until after the Iraqi parliament votes.

This was not only so as to not let the Iraqis know what the American interpretation is going to be, it was also to block discussion in America.

After 11 months of hard-nosed negotiations with Washington and a flurry of 11th hour horse-trading leading up to the vote, the pact was approved by 144 members of the 198 who attended the session of the 275-member assembly.

Pakistan Daily published a list of Iraqi academics assassinated in Iraq during the US-led occupation.

This is a particularly meaningful aspect of the Iraq genocide, the extermination of its intellectual classes. It wasn't enough to invade and occupy what was once the most advanced country in the Middle East and destroy its economy. Iraq had to be obliterated, its history re-written and its future denied.

Well, look at the agreement's text. It is remarkable for the number and scope of the concessions that the Iraqi government has managed to get from the Bush administration. They amount to a series of U-turns that spell the complete defeat of the neoconservative plan to turn Iraq into a pro-western ally and a platform from which to project US power across the Middle East.

Reporting from Baghdad — Sunni lawmakers today listed a host of demands, ranging from sweeping political reforms to amnesty for prisoners, in exchange for supporting a pact to keep U.S. forces in Iraq through 2011, dimming Iraqi leaders' hopes for a smooth victory when parliament votes on the measure.

Spare tires come in handy in Sadr City when lakes of sewage overflow trenches or bubble up from broken underground pipes. Pedestrians pull them from at-ready stacks to create a foot bridge across the excrement.

It’s a routine honed by years of neglect, indifference and, recently, good intentions sucked into a cycle of despair. Almost six years after the fall of Saddam Hussein, sewers in the sprawling Baghdad slum have become the most odorous example of how things don’t get done in Iraq.

Iraq’s Parliament has delayed by at least 24 hours a vote on a security agreement with the United States that would lead to the withdrawal of American troops from Iraq in three years.

Two American servicemen were shot and killed Tuesday by a gunman in an Iraqi army uniform while they were distributing humanitarian aid in northern Iraq, the U.S. military said.

Echoing comments last week from State Department adviser David Satterfield, Iraqi Prime Minister Nouri al-Maliki has said his government will not seek an extended UN Mandate if the Status of Forces Agreement (SOFA) with the US fails to pass parliament. Though both sides had previously expressed interest in using an extension of the mandate, which expires at the end of December, as a fallback position, Satterfield indicated last week that the US would block the extension if proposed.

The number of cruel incidents involving our armed forces in Iraq is the most under reported story from our media. The Internet has many of these and we bring this to view because we can never win the hearts & minds of the region with these actions.

Hillary Clinton is ready to join Barack Obama's cabinet as the Secretary of State, according to the United States' National Public radio. If appointed she will have to deal with George Bush's controversial foreign policy legacy.

Iraq's defense minister Abdul Qadir Muhammed Jassim threatened to declare a state of emergency if Iraq's parliament refused to sign an accord allowing US troops to stay in the country for three more years.

His rhetoric was eerily in tune with Bush Administration officials' comments on domestic security and Iran, echoing language used by the Administration to bolster support for the Iraq war.

Iraq's defense minister Abdul Qadir Muhammed Jassim threatened to declare a state of emergency if Iraq's parliament refused to sign an accord allowing US troops to stay in the country for three more years.

If the US withdraws, he said, "we shall wait for a strike against us, in our midst." He added that foreign intelligence services may be attempting to infiltrate Iraqi affairs -- a shot at Iran -- an identical charge made by US officials.

A state of emergency could allow Iraq's government to dissolve parliament.

Supporters of Hojatoleslam Moqtada al-Sadr, the anti-American cleric, burnt an effigy of George Bush in Baghdad yesterday and gave warning of a return to armed resistance if parliament approves a deal that will allow US forces to remain in Iraq for three more years.

“No, no to the agreement of humiliation,” the followers chanted at a demonstration against the pact in a square in Baghdad where US Marines toppled a statue of Saddam Hussein after the March 2003 invasion.

In a nutshell, the Pentagon's argument couldn't be simpler or more red-bloodedly American: We have too much stuff to leave Iraq any time soon. In war, as in peace, we're trapped by our own profligacy. We are the Neiman Marcus and the Wal-Mart of combat. Where we go, our "stuff" goes with us – in such prodigious quantities that removing it is going to prove more daunting than invading in the first place.

AFTER AN agonizing 17 years, the U.S. government will finally have to admit what veterans and their families have long known--Gulf War Illness is a very real and debilitating condition that has affected one-quarter of soldiers who served in the 1990-91 war.

The Research Advisory Committee on Gulf War Veterans' Illnesses (RAC-GWVI)--a committee of scientists and veterans appointed by Congress in 2002 to investigate the illnesses experienced by veterans of Operation Desert Storm--presented its 450-page report to Secretary of Veterans Affairs James Peake on November 17.

A senior British law lord, former Lord Chief Justice Lord Bingham, stated yesterday in a speech at the British Institute of International and Comparative Law in London that the decision to go to war in Iraq in 2003 was “a serious violation of international law”.

Secretary of Defense Robert M Gates suggested there was "some sense of an increased level of [Iranian] supply of weapons and support to these groups". And Washington Post reporter Karen DeYoung was told by military officials that the "plentiful, high quality weaponry" the militias were then using in Basra was "recently manufactured in Iran".

Followers of a Shiite cleric on Friday stomped on and burned an effigy of President George W. Bush in the same central Baghdad square where Iraqis beat a toppled statue of Saddam Hussein with their sandals five years earlier.

Activists note that most of the candidates for top security posts voted for the 2002 resolution authorizing President Bush to invade Iraq or otherwise supported launching the war.

State Department adviser David Satterfield is quoted in the Iraqi press as saying the United States not only isn’t exploring an extension, they would reject the extension of the UN mandate and would withdraw all troops from Iraq if the Iraqis don’t approve the SOFA.

The Iraqi Parliament’s debate on the Status of Forces Agreement (SOFA) was expected to be contentious, but it would have been difficult to envision just how contentious things ended up today. Influential Shi’ite cleric Moqtada al-Sadr’s parliamentary bloc had firmly opposed the SOFA from the beginning, and loudly forced an adjournment as the SOFA was being read to parliament.

The US media distinguishes itself by obeying the guiding hand of
neglect when it comes to ignoring issues detrimental to corporate
interests. Here is an overview from the Real News Network.

Iran's parliament speaker urged Iraqi lawmakers to keep resisting a security pact with the United States, official media said Tuesday, a day after Baghdad signed an accord on U.S. troop presence in Iraq.

Iraqi Foreign Minister Hoshiyar Zebari and U.S. ambassador Ryan Crocker signed Monday the long-awaited deal requiring Washington to withdraw its forces by the end of 2011, eight years after the U.S.-led invasion that toppled Saddam Hussein.

It must still be passed by the Iraqi parliament.

The American media is by and large swallowing the propaganda line that the Iraqi cabinet's acquiescence to a "Status of Forces Agreement" (SOFA) with the U.S. occupation force means that the Iraq War will be over in 2011.

But as usual, there is a wide, yawning abyss between the packaged, freeze-dried pabulum for public consumption and the gritty, blood-flecked truth on the ground. As Jason Ditz reports at Antiwar.com, the so-called "deadline" in 2011 for the withdrawal of all U.S. forces remains, as ever, an "aspiration," not an iron-clad guarantee.

The text of the United States-Iraq Status of Forces Agreement (SOFA) signed by US ambassador Ryan Crocker and Iraqi Foreign Minister Hoshyar Zebari on Monday closes the door to a further US military presence beyond 2011 even more tightly than the previous draft and locks in a swift end to Iraqi dependence on the US military that appears to be irreversible.

In a daring guerrilla raid earlier this fall, members of the Los Angeles chapter of Iraq Veterans Against the War (IVAW) infiltrated a local gas station to deploy a battalion of 4171 toy soldiers, together with a sign reading, "Price of Gas: 4171 U.S. Soldiers."

The Iraq War? Illegal. Who says so? The former top law lord of America's main ally in the invasion and occupation. What does it mean? It means that the whole mass-murdering operation was, has been, and remains a damnable crime against humanity by any and all legal standards, even those of the invading countries themselves. (To say nothing of the moral abomination involved).

Legal advice given to Tony Blair by the attorney general prior to the Iraq war was fundamentally "flawed," a former law lord has claimed.

Lord Bingham said Lord Goldsmith had given Mr Blair "no hard evidence" that Iraq had defied UN resolutions "in a manner justifying resort to force".

The struggle for influencing Barack Obama's foreign policy agenda has begun in right earnest. The maneuvering by influential establishment figures - including Congressional voices, Obama advisors and even military officials - who are projecting incumbent Robert Gates as secretary of defense in the incoming administration highlights the pressures working on the president-elect.

The big bang is not that Prime Minister Nuri al-Maliki's majority Shi'ite/Kurdish 37-member cabinet in Baghdad has approved the draft of a security pact with the George W Bush (and Barack Obama) administrations allowing the US military to stay in Iraq for three more years; it's that the 30-strong Sadrist bloc will move heaven and Earth - including massive nationwide protests - to bloc the pact in the Iraqi National Assembly.

Iraqi lawmakers Monday began debate over a pact with the United States that will allow U.S. forces to remain for three more years, while an Iranian official close to that country's leadership praised the Iraqi Cabinet for approving the deal.

Thousands of Sunni and Shiite Arabs took to the streets across Iraq Saturday to defend Prime Minister Nuri al-Maliki against criticism from leaders of the country's Kurdish minority.

They came out to protest remarks made earlier this week by Kurdish regional president Massud Barzani, who accused Maliki of illegally allying with tribes in areas with large Kurdish populations to expand the power of the state.

MP Ahmed al-Masoudi, a spokesman for the bloc said on Sunday that the government's endorsement of the US-Iraq security pact "did not mean anything" as long as it required the approval of a parliament which would reject it, the Voices of Iraq news agency reported.

He added that a majority of the Iraqi nation was against the pact and it would be rejected by Parliament because "a large number of lawmakers from different blocs" are opposed to it.

Iraq's cabinet defied fiery opposition from Shiite hardliners on Sunday and approved a wide-ranging military pact that includes a timetable for the withdrawal of all US troops by the end of 2011.

The cabinet approved the agreement after a two and a half hour meeting, with 28 ministers out of 38 voting for it, including Prime Minister Nuri al-Maliki, a government official said.

The Sadrist parliamentary bloc says the Iraqi National Assembly will reject a security pact between Baghdad and Washington, despite the government's endorsement.

Why does the US occupation and the Iraqi government cover up such incidents? How many such incidents have the governments cover up? Why did they decrease the number of victims in their reports?

After months of tough negotiations and multiple revisions, Prime Minister Nouri al Maliki has decided to back the controversial U.S.-Iraq security agreement that calls for the complete withdrawal of American troops by the end of 2011, Iraqi and U.S. officials said Friday.

Massoud Barzani, the President of Iraq’s Kurdish Regional Government, also continued to express doubt that the SOFA would be signed, but warned that “if the pact is not signed, the situation in the country may deteriorate to the point of a civil war.” President Barzani has been an outspoken supporter of the SOFA and the continued US military presence, even suggesting that the 150,000-plus US troops could all be hosted in Kurdistan if the SOFA fell through.

For all the effort the peace movement has put in, and for all the influence the antiwar message has had on pubic opinion (without which Barack Obama would not have been elected), the peace movement has almost no ability to influence Congress or the president elect. Take a look at Obama's short list for possible appointees to the Pentagon, or his vice presidential pick, or his chief of staff: there's nobody within a mile of the new administration who opposed the war.